Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Anand Janefalkar: It brings us up to 2011. Motorola was an amazing company to be an employee. It was a little difficult to be a consumer. I got very jaded with a little bit of inaccurate marketing. Phone’s not selling to the potential of the hardware that we’ve been building. I decided that it was time for a change. Seven years is a long time. I decided to move to the West Coast. I did a couple of short stint but essentially ended up at Jawbone that had another extremely impressive product line in audio products.

One of the products is the Jambox – big Jambox and small Jambox. I think it is pretty magical to have that crisp and that deep sound coming from a device that literally doesn’t look like a speaker. In addition to all of the technical, professional, and process maturity that I could gain at Motorola, I credit Jawbone for the exposure to how a fast-paced product can work. Not only was it the technology that they focused on and making sure it delights the customers, but it was also UX.

The product looks amazing. The controls are very simple. Sometimes as engineers, we really tend to over-engineer products and services. I think Jawbone really hit home. It had just four keys. Pause or play, next, previous, volume, and on button. That’s enough to have an extremely successful product and make it something you want to keep and not tucked away behind something. That’s where the user experience side and the kind of just the look and feel part of it was shaped.

Sramana Mitra: How long were you at Jawbone?

Anand Janefalkar: I was there until April 2013.

Sramana Mitra: Does UJET come right after?

Anand Janefalkar: After that, I started UJET on July 10, 2015. There are couple of things in between that I did. Right after Jawbone, I felt that I was definitely ready. I wanted to start my own thing and be able to prove to myself, more than anything, that I had the recipe for success. I didn’t know anyone in the investor community. Neither did I know any founders.

I did take a little bit of a break because there’s something going on with my personal life. Then I started working with a couple of investors in helping them with some of their portfolio companies that were doing hardware products. I quickly realized that just because I have done hardware and wireless cellular technologies doesn’t mean that I need to just keep doing that. What I really ask myself is what is the biggest problem that I face on a regular basis and that I believe others face too. It quickly dawned on me that it’s customer support.

I have a pretty complicated last name. It’s spelled Janefalkar. Most of the time, people can’t even pronounce it. Unfortunately, anytime people want to write it, especially in the US or in Europe, they usually just automatically put an E between the K and the R. Most of the time, people spell it as Janeflker. I started seeing that a lot of my emails were not arriving because people were just automatically misspelling my name. I figured that I can’t be the only one that’s facing this problem. There has to be other people with similarly complicated name or just associating with a different pronunciation or different spelling that could be frustrated by this.

When I looked deeper and broader in the sector, I couldn’t find anyone that has really had a delightful customer support experience. That’s when I started thinking, “I think this is an industry that’s completely void of user experience and is also completely disconnected from the times that we live in.” Very rarely does a technologist get to build a business on a behavior change that has occurred five years ago. A lot of times when technologists build a product or business or service, they have to create a change of behavior.

Even in the cellphone industry, there’s the move from pressing buttons to tapping on a touch screen. It’s still a change of behavior. I applaud this as a great opportunity because definitely by about 2010, people had embraced smartphones whether they’re Android, iOS, and even Nokia. People are used to using smartphones. People are used to using visual and contextual data. When two humans communicate, they communicate contextually and visually.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I’m buying a car and I want to tell my parents. I’ll take a picture and send it over through a text. When I call them I say it like, “Did you see? I just bought this car.” I don’t call them up and say “Dad, I got a new car. This particular brand. It’s black on the outside and it has grey leather interior. It’s 12 feet wide and six feet long.” That’s not how humans communicate. The only time that happens is when you’re talking to a customer support representative. I thought that was completely disconnected with the times.

The very fact that a call originating from a traditional landline or a dialer has the same experience to a call that originates from a smartphone whether it’s inside an app or a mobile website is broken. So I decided to fix that and that was the genesis of UJET.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar
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